Improving Your Relationship For Dummies Book Summary - Improving Your Relationship For Dummies Book explained in key points

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Improving Your Relationship For Dummies summary

Name: Improving Your Relationship For Dummies
Rating: 4.3 (86 reviews)
Author: Paula Hall

Paula Hall

The hands-on, practical guide for couples

4.3 (86 ratings)

21 mins

Topics

Marriage Sex

Table of Contents

Improving Your Relationship For Dummies
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Tools that can upgrade any relationship.

Most of us have many different relationships. There’s probably someone in your life who makes your heart beat faster, and there’s probably someone else who makes you want to scream and shout in anger.

Relationships are omnipresent and multifarious. You have them with your family and your friends, with your spouse, your boss and your co workers: the list goes on. Unfortunately – might as well admit it – these relationships aren’t always as blooming and healthy as one might wish them.

So how do you turn the not-so-healthy ones around? This is what these blinks are all about. They constitute a hands-on, practical guide to improving your relationships, providing you with plenty of valuable tips and tricks.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

what sushi might do for your relationship;
if your relationship has the three most important strengths; and
why replacing broken boilers in winter shouldn’t break your relationship.

A strong relationship rests on compatibility, intimacy and day-to-day stability.

Every relationship has its ups and downs. When you hit a rough patch, it’s easy to forget about the positive things and dwell on the negative. If you want to improve your relationship, however, you have to build on its strengths.

All solid romantic relationships have three core strengths: compatibility, intimacy and day-to-day stability.

The first core strength, compatibility, is the foundation of your relationship. It’s the degree to which you and your partner actually suit each other. Do you have the same outlook on life? Do you share the same passions or interests?

People change as they get older, and compatibility changes accordingly. However, your core principles and life goals – a desire to have children, for instance, or a belief in monogamy – generally don’t change much over time, and it’s these goals and principles that truly form the foundation of compatibility.

The second core strength is intimacy: how close you and your partner really are. Intimacy doesn’t just appear out of nowhere; it’s a product of time and deep mutual understanding.

There are three different kinds of intimacy. Emotional intimacy is about how openly you share your emotions. Intellectual intimacy is about how well you understand each other's thought processes. And physical intimacy is about how well you connect physically, through touch or sex.

Each kind of intimacy is important, but it’s unlikely that a couple will feel perfectly intimate in each arena. Identifying which area of intimacy needs work is the first step toward improving it.

The last core strength, day-to-day stability, concerns how your relationship plays out on a daily level. Stability is extremely valuable; indeed, a relationship isn’t sustainable without it.

Your relationship simply can’t survive if it suffers from daily tension, no matter how compatible or intimate you are. When it comes to romance, harmony in your daily life is absolutely crucial to long-term success.

Improving your relationship often requires boosting your own self-esteem.

How can someone else love you if you don’t even love yourself? Your self-esteem isn’t just about you: it has a major impact on both your relationship and your partner.

Relationship problems are often the result of low self-esteem. Everyone feels blue or insecure from time to time, but that feeling can turn into a deep-rooted anxiety if it persists long-term. And this can lead to paranoia: you might start thinking that there’s no reason for your partner to love you. Such thoughts may manifest as jealousy, for instance, or as abject dependence.

Accept the differences between you and your partner, and strive to grow with them.

No two people are exactly alike. Even identical twins have slightly different DNA. So, naturally, you and your partner will have your differences, too! Accepting that reality is an important part of maintaining a healthy relationship.

There are some common personality differences that couples tend to face.

Be sure to spend quality time with your partner no matter how busy you are.

At the beginning of a relationship, you want to spend as much time with your newfound love as possible. During that sweet honeymoon period, it’s easy to find time to focus on your beloved; that’s all you want to do. As you settle into a routine, however, it usually becomes harder to make time for the relationship.

This can be dangerous. Spending quality time with your partner is vital, even when your life starts to get hectic. So keep your relationship on track by learning to separate things that are urgent from things that are merely important.

Boost your relationship by boosting your love chemicals.

There’s a reason new relationships are so much fun. Indeed, in those early stages of romance, your body produces the same chemicals that addiction triggers. Intense feelings of attraction, butterflies in your stomach, light-headedness, a loss of appetite – all are responses to certain chemicals your body releases when you’re in love.

One of those love chemicals is dopamine, a hormone that creates feelings of pleasure. Your serotonin levels, on the other hand, drop when you’re in love, and since serotonin helps you stay calm, a decrease results in feelings of nervousness and excitement. Your brain also releases phenylethylamine, or PEA – otherwise known as the “love” molecule.

Having sex is a healthy and important part of your relationship.

When newly in a relationship, most partners can’t keep their hands off each other. The beginning is usually the most physically exciting time. As time goes by, however, that sexual excitement tends to fade. So, let’s go over some tips for keeping your sex life fun and interesting.

Sex isn’t merely a fun and pleasurable activity. It’s actually beneficial for both partners individually, and it’s an important part of maintaining any relationship.

Use active listening to communicate effectively.

Everybody makes communication mistakes sometimes – it’s perfectly normal, an inevitable part of human interaction. However, if these mistakes go unrecognized and unaddressed, they can become a barrier to a relationship’s success.

As with all problems, these communication mistakes can’t be rectified until they’re identified. So, let’s go over a few of the most common stumbling blocks couples encounter when trying to communicate.

When you have to disagree, timing and approach are critical.

There’s no such thing as a relationship that’s free of disagreements. As we’ve seen before, all couples have their differences, and maintaining a good relationship is about managing those differences. So, let’s go over some tips for making your disagreements as healthy and productive as possible.

The first thing you need to consider is timing. Bad timing can make a small problem explode into a big one. You probably don’t want to discuss your intimacy problems on the bus, for instance. Your partner might get off before you’ve reached your stop!

It takes time and support to overcome an affair, and you need to identify its underlying causes.

Learning about a partner’s affair can be a traumatizing experience. Unfortunately, a lot of relationships don’t survive it.

Coping with an affair is hardest when the news first arrives. Both partners need time and support to process their thoughts and the situation. So, when you first learn about an affair, go to your closest friends or relatives – people who can help you get through the first and stormiest phase.

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What is Improving Your Relationship For Dummies about?

Improving Your Relationship For Dummies (2010) provides simple techniques for couples hoping to boost their intimacy, sharpen their communication and overcome challenges in a productive, healthy way. It offers advice for both new couples that want to start off on the right foot and long-term couples that hope to get things back on track.

Who should read Improving Your Relationship For Dummies?

Couples going through a rough patch
Partners hoping to improve communication
Anyone thinking about entering a relationship

About the Author

Paula Hall is a writer and psychotherapist who specializes in helping couples overcome sexual and romantic problems. She is also the founder of The Institute for Sex Addiction Training and Head of Recovery for The Naked Truth Project.

© Paula Hall: Improving Your Relationship For Dummies copyright 2010, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc. and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.

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